1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and program for coordinate decision procedure of VOXEL model and a recording medium thereof, and more particularly to a method and program for coordinate decision procedure of VOXEL model and a recording medium which are employed in a structure analysis using a computer for computing physical quantities such as stress, deformation and thermal conduction in the structure of various shapes, relying on the VOXEL method, in which the error between the volume of a three-dimensional CAD model for an analysis object and the volume of a VOXEL model is made as small as possible.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in the structure analysis problem for computing the physical quantities such as stress, deformation and thermal conduction in a structure, the structure was approximated by an aggregate of small rectangular parallelepipeds, each called a VOXEL, to calculate the physical quantities such as stress, deformation and thermal conduction for its approximate model using the VOXEL method (finite element method, iteration method).
In generating a VOXEL model of an analysis object, the coordinate system for making the VOXEL division of the analysis object should be decided. Conventionally, this VOXEL coordinate system was appropriately set up by an analysis engineer based on the intuition and experience.
In the structure analysis method relying on the VOXEL method, to attain the calculation precision, it was necessary to reduce an approximation error by making each size of VOXEL as small as possible. However, there is a limit in reducing the size of VOXEL due to the constraints of hardware resources such as the CPU time or memory amount of computer.
In the structure analysis for computing the physical quantities such as stress, deformation and thermal conduction of a structure, the computation method relying on the VOXEL method involves making the computation of physical quantities such as stress, deformation and thermal conduction, employing the VOXEL model approximated by an aggregate of rectangular parallelepipeds of uniform element shape, each called a VOXEL. Therefore, there is an error between the actual volume of the analysis object and the volume of the VOXEL model, leading to errors in the calculated physical quantities such as stress, deformation and thermal conduction, resulting in the analysis with poor precision to compute the untrue values.
Since in setting up the VOXEL coordinates to generate the VOXEL model of the analysis object, the analysis engineer set up the appropriate coordinate system based on the intuition and experience, the error between the actual volume of the analysis object and the volume of the VOXEL model was not too small.
However, if the VOXEL size is reduced more than needed to increase the analysis precision, there is a problem that the analysis process is inoperable because of insufficient machine resources such as the CPU time or memory, and the desired result cannot be obtained, whereby the minimum of VOXEL size was limited.